| A Vietnamese national was sentenced yesterday in federal court in Boston for his role in an international scheme to use stolen payment card data and personally identifiable information to purchase and re-sell hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of consumer goods.
Tuan Dinh Nguyen, 30, a Vietnamese national previously living in Melbourne, Australia, was sentenced to 42 months in prison and ordered to pay forfeiture of $500,000. Nguyen pleaded guilty in May to one count of wire fraud conspiracy, one count of money laundering conspiracy, 13 counts of money laundering – aiding and abetting, and one count of aggravated identity theft. Nguyen was indicted in federal court in Boston in August 2015, arrested in Australia in June 2017, and extradited to the United States on Oct. 5, 2017.
Nguyen and at least three others between December 2007 and December 2013 conspired to use stolen payment card data and personally identifiable information to purchase consumer goods online and to re-sell those items on auction websites, including Amazon, eBay, and Buy.com; they then wired the proceeds overseas.
Nguyen and his co-conspirators created fraudulent accounts on multiple auction websites, or used stolen usernames and passwords to take over subscribers’ legitimate accounts. They then posted popular goods for sale at a discounted price, including Apple merchandise, electronics, personal care items and books. However, Nguyen and his co-conspirators did not own or otherwise have these goods to sell. Instead, when customers of the auction websites purchased and paid for these items, Nguyen and his co-conspirators used stolen payment card and personally identifiable information to buy the items from Walmart.com or other e-commerce websites, and then shipped the items to the auction website customers, who never knew that the items they received had been purchased with stolen credit cards and re-sold to them at discounted prices.
To obtain the proceeds of the scheme, Nguyen and his co-conspirators recruited U.S. residents to withdraw and wire overseas the money that the unwitting customers had paid through the auction websites. Nguyen and his co-conspirators stole and re-sold approximately $500,000 in consumer goods in total.
